I cover real estate, writing about everything from trends in the housing market to ultra high-end luxury listings to data-based cities lists. Real estate is in my blood thanks to a realtor for a mom and a property developer/landlord for a dad. I have had a front row seat for the real estate market's inflation and subsequent crash over the past decade, watching my dad carry on with underwater mortgages and my mom struggle to put home sales together. I have been both a homeowner and a renter in the New York area and can't decide which I prefer.
I am also a regular guest on the 'Forbes on Fox' show on Fox News every Saturday morning and can sometimes be found discussing the major business headlines of the week on MSNBC's 'Weekends with Alex Witt.'
Before taking on the real estate beat, I worked as an Anchor/Reporter in Forbes Video. These days I shoot videos of crazy homes.
I graduated from New York University in 2009 with a BA in Anthropology and prior to that I worked in the other end of media as a recording artist with Sony.
If you have tips, story ideas or listings to submit for consideration, email me at mbrennan@forbes.com.

Controlling Your Home With The Touch Of An iPad

When you step off the elevator into the 8,000-square foot Savant Experience Center, it feels less like a showroom and more like a swanky Manhattan abode. “We wanted to develop a space where technology blended in with the environment,” says Robert Madonna, chief executive of Savant Systems, a Hyannis, Mass.-based home automation company. ”We built a high-end New York City ‘apartment’ and…everything is automated.”

The Savant Experience Center, which took eight months to craft and opened in July, was designed by Thom Filicia of TV show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” fame. It hosts a master bedroom with a walk-in closet, a loft-like living room, a Theo Kalomirakis-designed home theater, even a sports bar. But the real draw isn’t the lavish layout (which also has a hotel room, an office and a classroom); it’s the technology that covertly operates the space. Every “room” in the center is automated by Savant Systems and easily controlled with Apple products like iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch-embedded remote controls.

Toting an iPad himself, Madonna offers a tour of the mock smart home. We start in the living room,where he pulls up a picture of the room on the tablet’s screen, courtesy of Savant’s TrueImage software. His finger taps a digital recreation of the floor lamp that flanks the couch. The lamp immediately lights up. He taps on more room fixtures, changing the color of the sconces bordering the fireplace and closing the window shades. We proceed through the center, remotely adjusting lights, monitoring room temperature, checking power usage, even summoning a hidden flat screen television out of the master bedroom’s dresser.

The technology works remotely from anywhere in the world. If you have an internet connection, you can control the home. Want the air conditioning running when you walk through the door on a hot summer day, flick it on using your iPhone.

Madonna founded the company seven years ago on the belief that home automation should translate into a user-friendly experience — a concept that has made Apple into a $632 billion powerhouse. For that reason Savant’s products are 100% Apple-based. Software and hardware rolled out of Apple’s Cupertino, Calif. headquarters are eventually adapted by Savant for home use. With the iCloud, for example, the company can distribute audio throughout a house, attaching music to the cloud service so those songs can be accessed and played from anywhere in the home.

Pricing for products runs the gamut, from installations of single rooms with simple controls to entire mansions fitted with every automation possibility. “In the past home automation was only for luxury homes because there was a cost barrier,” explains Madonna, swiping his finger across his iPad to fiddle with the programming on four conjoined television screens in the so-called sports bar. “With the iPad and iPhone, those costs are getting lower so the average homeowner can now afford to put automation directly into the home for security, lighting control, entertainment.”

“Anyone who can afford to buy an iPhone can essentially have a piece of automation in their home,” adds Madonna. Just make sure you schedule an appointment if you do plan to visit the experience center. Affordable or not, in true luxury fashion, they only offer tours to prospective clients who call ahead of time.

Want to peek inside the Savant Experience Center? Check out the video above.

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Pretty amazing what iPads/tablets can do but it seems like there is so much more lying under the surface waiting to be unleashed. Would love to see more apps that can talk to cars, homes, TVs in new and exciting ways that improve our daily lives. I’m reading more and more about connected cars…maybe that will be the next big thing to incorporate tablet tech. My employer, SAP, has a pretty good handle on what this could look like:

What they show is not very impressive in terms of making things easy. Finding an ipad to turn switches on and off is not really ‘automation’ of anything. ‘You can watch multiple tv shows simultaneously’ is also completely pointless. You mostly don’t want to do that in the first place. This is more like ‘TVs are cheap now, so let’s put 4-5 of them in every room’. Why do you want to watch three tvs on your bedroom door? Not only not useful or automated, but actually bad. Changing ambient light to green and blue with an ipad? Enjoyable for about 5 minutes and hardly useful for daily living.

Really cool but I’m really disappointed when I find a company that tries to user marketing to convey something that they aren’t… “belief that home automation should translate into a user-friendly experience.” Most home automation requires things like THEY too require. On their website, they offer a Savant Host a UNIX-based OS X® hosting platform. A what?! That sounds either expensive or very technical. Certainly not user-friendly.

Perhaps they mean that once it’s set up they want it to be user friendly?? Well that’s the goal of any home automation; heck, that’s the point of home automation. I don’t see how what they are doing is any friendlier than most of the other options. And @Andremu’s point should be reinforced! No, Savant’s products are hardly the only home automation solutions that are exclusively on Apple.

Look at what something like Lowe’s Iris is doing and then we can talk user-friendly.

The Savant Host is installed by Savant trained techs. For the home user … their entire residence is controlled by using Apple iPhones, iPod Touch, and iPads. These iOs devices allow the end user to easily control their home from a very easy and familiar interface. With little effort or thought, touching the iPad easily controls lighting, security, audio, flat screens, Shades, HVAC and much more. The Savant Host is in the background and is never touched by the end user. It is simply a means to an end – and a very elegant end at that.

I am sure that there are other pure Apple control products out there but very few have the Power of Savant and the ease of use to control almost every facet of the home. There are two types of home control systems … the DIY stuff that sort of works sometimes and the professionally installed systems like Savant and others that can control just about anything – and do this consistently from an iPad. Sure not every iPad app is a great one but most are easy to use. We have installed many of these systems for our clients. Some of these clients love Apple and technology but have just a little bit of knowledge about how to use their Macbook, iPhone, or iPad. Within minutes these clients understand the Savant system. How much easier can it be? Go to Lowes or Home Depot if you must, but don’t expect the same kind of user experience a real system like Savant can offer.